The Veil
by mak5258
Summary: Hermione passes through the Veil, but is that it? Is it so simple? So final? Would there be more chapters coming if it were? HG/SS eventually
1. Morior

Over the course of the last few years of her life, Hermione Granger had allotted a good deal of time to contemplating death. It wasn't that she had been feeling particularly morbid over the past few years, just that she'd been one of the centerpieces in a war against the Darkest wizard of the age. She hadn't just contemplated her own death, either; she'd worried about Harry and Ron and Ginny and Fred and George and all the rest of the Weasleys and the Order. She had come to a few conclusions: between herself and Harry, they'd agreed that to be skinned alive and then drowned in lemon juice would be the most painful way to go, particularly if the Cruciatus was cast as one was submerged in the citrus. Harry had expressed the desire to go quickly, like his parents. A simple _Avada Kedavra_, a flash of green, then you were just dead. It was rather traumatizing for the survivors and witnesses, sure, but it wouldn't be so bad for the subject, considering the alternatives. Tortured to death, for instance, would be highly unpleasant. Surviving torture to be tortured another day was the contender in the argument of 'which is worse,' which she and Harry played often in those last months in the tent by themselves, after Ron had abandoned them.

In the end, Hermione could only observe that death was abrupt.

Hers had come upon her slowly, sure, but the actual dying had been sudden. One minute she was in more pain than she'd ever been in, the feeling that her very soul was straining to free itself from the bounds of her body simply to escape the torture. The bleeding, the burning, seering, stabbing.

They'd won the Battle of Hogwarts, Harry had defeated Voldemort in the Great Hall, gutting him with the Sword of Gryffindor while wearing the Sorting Hat on his head, looking ridiculous, but nobody cared. The Death Eaters had fled. Hermione had gone to the Shrieking Shack after, to see if anything could be done about Ron and Professor Snape. Ron was easy, she'd sealed his skin and rennervated him, forced a Blood Replenishing Potion down his throat, and sent him on his way back to the Hogwarts grounds with a scowl. Snape had been more difficult, the wounds from the snake, which lay dead beside him, another victim to the Sword of Gryffindor, refusing to give over to her spells.

In the end, she'd stooped to Muggle means of medicine and stitched his neck shut magically, using sanitized thread from the raggedy Weasley sweater she wore. In her exhaustion and distraction, as he was coming around, she'd been attacked from behind.

Bellatrix Lestrange, who had disappeared from the Great Hall the moment it seemed her Dark Lord was going to fall, was in the Shrieking Shack. Hermione gasped, finding herself disarmed before she was able to do more than look over her shoulder. The blade of the knife was cold, sliding up under her rib cage into a lung. The act of breathing burned, every breath punctured the lung again on the knife in her ribs but she couldn't stop gasping for air. The knife was removed, the witch standing over her smiling and watching. Hermione could feel warmth seeping out of her from the entrance wound, feel it pooling inside of her where the proper channels for flow had been disrupted by the blade.

She fell to the floor, hitting her head and seeing stars in addition to the spots from blood loss for a moment before her vision cleared enough that she could make out that Professor Snape was conscious and watching, confused, unable to move because of the charms she'd put on him to keep him still earlier. She prayed they would lift quickly when she was dead so that he would be able to react, to get away, maybe kill, Bellatrix.

Mad laughter met her ears, bringing Hermione's attention back to the maniac with the knife.

Again and again the knife entered her. For lack of anything better to do, Hermione counted. She was stabbed fifteen times in the gut after the initial stab to her lung. Then the spells began. The Cruciatus, of course, but not for long. There was the spell that pulled at her limbs, pulling her shoulders and elbows out of joint, bursting the fluid behind her kneecaps, cracking her pelvis. Her throat felt as though her vocal chords had been doused with acid, the screams tore through her so.

Smiling, Bellatrix took Hermione's left forearm and pressed her wand to the spot where the Dark Mark marred Death Eater flesh. For a terrified moment, Hermione was sure she was to be Marked, that there would be awful rumors spread about her after her death, that she had been a traitor. Instead, she gasped, unable to cry out any longer, when instead she was branded with a spell that felt as though a branding iron for cattle had been pressed to the soft flesh just below the bend at the inside of her elbow. The smell of burnt flesh made her want to retch, but she didn't have the energy, nor was she able to move so that she wouldn't choke on her own vomit.

"Look, Mudblood; now you have a Mark, too," Bellatrix said, holding the arm up so Hermione could see. The skin was bubbling into blisters from the heat, the skin red and pink where it wasn't entirely given over to open bloody flesh beneath, the edges charred black. Through the marred flesh, she could just make out the image of a skull, the curve of the cranium and eye sockets, the jagged edge of teeth; the only thing missing from it being a Dark Mark was the snake. She'd seen the brand before. It was Bellatrix's specialty, given to the Muggles she tortured on the Death Eaters' Muggle-baiting expeditions.

Then the witch left. She hadn't noticed that her old 'friend' was struggling for consciousness in his immobility. Hermione was thankful for that.

For awhile, she bled out. The pain was immense; dripping, draining. In the moments when she could detach herself from it, she could hear the struggling gurgle of her breath; it had a strange raspy quality that she figured was from her abused vocal chords. Her stomach felt bloated and full of holes all at once. Everything was very raw. While her limbs felt shattered and very, very cold, her torso seemed to be burning up as her blood pooled in the wounds and flowed out, soaking into her sweater and dripping to the floor, soaking her jeans as well.

Coherent thought was nonexistent. There was only the pain, the sensations surrounding the pain. She couldn't see anything, just splotches of color, flashes of memories of faces and places that she couldn't name.

She was brought back to her present situation when she finally gagged, reflexively trying to roll onto her side but only managing to increase the amount of pain she was in exponentially. She cried out, but that was a mistake. As she'd thought before, though before she'd thought she was going to vomit, the blood that had made its way up into her throat caught and she but was unable to cough or even turn to get gravity to take care of the regurgitated fluids in her wind pipe.

Panicking, she forced her eyes to focus on the room around her. Professor Snape was watching her, a look of complete horror on his face, the rest of him immobile. She wished for a moment that she could thank him for all that he had done for her, because she was finally aware of it. She figured, though, that he deserved more than she could thank him for.

_Maybe the fact that he will live through this and I will die now will be enough_, she thought to herself, but the thought didn't make sense even as it stuck with her.

She couldn't breathe. There was no air getting to her around her own blood. Everything was cold. Even the blood pooling in her stomach seemed to be icy. The world wouldn't focus anymore; huge black spots speckled her vision, blocking things out entirely. Even the memories that had been popping up at random before stopped.

Quite suddenly, the pain was gone. It felt as though she was in a pool of water, but she didn't feel the need to breathe. She just felt cushioned, the water supporting what had previously been rioting pain in her joints. She still couldn't see, everything was a giant black spot. It didn't bother her, though; the simple fact that the pain was gone was enough to put her at ease.

There were whispers, unrecognizable, friendly voices surrounding her. A brush of fabric, light, almost wet to the touch though she did not get wet as she felt it swing behind her.

The curtain had fallen; it was finished.


	2. Commoneo

Severus hardly managed to move his hand out in time to catch himself when the spells Granger had put on his abruptly ceased to function and he slipped to the side. Moving hurt, but not moving would have hurt more.

Feeling an utter bastard, he guided his own fall 'til he was nearly horizontal on the floor, a finger looping into the strap of the potions kit Granger had pulled from a beaded purse that looked much too small to have held the kit in the first place. Desperately, he fished a vial of Blood Replenishing Potion from the kit and swallowed, forcing his gag reflex not to respond to the horrid, metallic taste of the potion.

When his eyes opened again somebody was moving in the room. For the briefest of seconds, he thought it was Granger, that she hadn't died. But it was Potter; Weasley was there too, stationary in the doorway. Potter was on his knees, sobbing over Granger's broken body, shoulders heaving.

Severus was sure he was delusional; he could've sworn to Boy Who Lived was wearing the Sorting Hat.

-

"It's therapeutic, Professor," Miss Ellis insisted. Of course, she was Junior Healer Ellis, now. She was four years gone from the halls of Hogwarts; she'd been a Hufflepuff.

He didn't deign to respond to the young witch, though. He glared, as he had all the other times she'd tried to convince him. He didn't need therapy. He needed out of St. Mungo's. The place held nothing but bad memories and the smells of the infirm.

With a sigh, Ellis left the room, but she left the large spiral-bound pad of thick paper and the charcoal pencil behind. He was supposed to _draw_ his demons out. The healers felt sure that he was traumatized from the war, both the wars, from its conclusion, from watching Granger die before his eyes moments after she'd saved his life.

He was quite sure that the healers of St. Mungo's had no idea how his mind worked, if they thought he would be traumatized by such things. Disturbed, maybe. Sorrowful that Granger was dead—of all his students, she had had potential. And he had long ago separated himself from reality enough that playing witness to another of Bella's murders did not drive him to any sort of real emotional reaction.

_Sketching_ in a Muggle notepad would certainly not cure him of his personality.

-

"I don't approve of this," Poppy said for the hundredth time. For the hundredth time, Severus ignored her. They'd been repeating the same conversation for the entire week since he'd been transferred to her ward. He couldn't believe he'd been relieved to be back at Hogwarts initially.

"I'm going."

He stood; leaning heavily on the plain black cane he needed to stay upright and began the long process of walking out of the Hospital Wing. Two weeks after the fact, the wound now a thick mass of scar tissue and scabs, he still felt vertiginous when he was upright for very long; he needed the thing for balance.

The Floo journey to 12 Grimmauld Place did nothing for his vertigo and even less for the near-constant nausea that had plagued him since he'd woken in St. Mungo's. It would pass in time, he'd been told. He had merely nodded and set about acquiring a cane that didn't make him feel like Lucius Malfoy. He'd only been partially successful.

"Hello, Professor," Ginny Weasley said quietly when he stepped out of the fireplace. The kitchen was full of members of the Order, what would've been Granger's graduating class, Weasleys, and of that foolish group, Dumbledore's Army, that had been Granger's brainchild.

He didn't reply. He had nothing to say to the girl. He also wasn't sure he'd be able to keep his breakfast where it was supposed to be if he opened his mouth. Luckily, the girl didn't look as though she'd expected anything other than the half-surly look she got, and returned to consoling Potter.

From Grimmauld Place, the funeral party made their slow way to a cemetery hidden, as so many things were, in Muggle London.

If he'd been sentimental at all, he would've observed that the cemetery was quite suitable to Granger, or what he'd perceived her to be. The gravestones were gray and pristine, tended by a Squib groundskeeper instead of house elves. The grass was immaculate. There were a few blooming crab apple trees, which would come to season in the fall, which was when she'd always seemed to bloom a bit, anticipating the next school year. At the time of the funeral, everything was simply very green and alive, the gray stones all in their places, the one large crypt free of shadows in the noon sun, the various statues of angels and other tomb guardians all seeming to glow a bit in the light as well.

The memorial service began. Granger would receive a hero's burial; Potter had paid to make it almost as extravagant as Dumbledore's was rumored to have been.

As his killer, Severus hadn't been allowed to attend Albus' funeral.

The girl's body, wrapped in Gryffindor gold cloth, was sealed in the casket, the casket lowered into the ground. Her friends spoke; Potter and Weasley giving particularly heartfelt eulogies. Minerva McGonagall sobbed her way through her speech on heroism, determination; a brilliant child cut down before her time.

Severus wondered where Granger's parents were. Molly and Arthur Weasley sat in the traditional place for parents, their children in the places for siblings. It didn't escape Severus' notice that Potter was in the seat reserved for the grieving spouse and he wondered if that was by design or if the boy simply hadn't been alerted to Wizarding traditions.

The presiding wizard lifted his wand and the casket was ensconced in white light, then it was gone. In its place was a low, flat tomb with a statue of an angel that looked very much like Granger herself standing as serene guard at the head, maybe a meter tall.

The official ceremonies finished, mourners began filing past the tomb before making their way back out to Muggle London and whatever shreds of their lives waited beyond that. Severus waited for the majority of the guests to leave before he made his plodding, deliberate way to the new tomb.

It was a small tomb, but Granger had been a rather petite witch. On the top of the tomb, Granger's full name and birth and death dates were inscribed along with what Severus was sure her friends had thought was a fitting epitaph. Out of respect for the one who had died seconds after saving his life, he didn't snort as he read it.

-

Severus scowled down at the Great Hall. More precisely, he scowled at the students occupying the Great Hall. The place was pure pandemonium—the Sorting had just finished and the first years were all experiencing their first meal at Hogwarts, complete with house elf cuisine and house elf delivery methods. The Muggle-borns were positively captivated by the novelty of it all.

Unwillingly, he was drawn back not so many years, remembering Granger's Sorting. He'd been more concerned with the Boy Who Lived, of course; everybody had been. He always took note of the Gryffindors, though; "know thine enemy" and all that.

Granger hadn't been so astonished as most Muggle-borns, but then, she'd probably already read _Hogwarts: a History_ by then. She was captivated by the castle, though, by magic. It was something that only Muggle-borns seemed to properly appreciate, he'd noticed over the years. They had a certain appreciation in their eyes in those first weeks that didn't fade so fast as the others as homework and routine forced them to adjust their worldview.

Severus growled to himself, forcing the memories away. More and more often he'd been drawn into thoughts of Granger. In the Hospital Wing, he'd remembered how she'd spent most of her second year in one of those beds, first after she'd used the wrong hair in her Polyjuice Potion—and that had provided him with a challenge, he had to admit—and then when she'd been Petrified by the basilisk. He'd been released from Poppy's domain, though, and she had still haunted his thoughts. The very castle reminded him of her. The halls she'd walked down. Hagrid's hut that she and her comrades had visited much too often to be good for their teeth. His own classroom where he'd taught her.

He'd distracted himself to the best of his abilities. He'd restocked the infirmary's potions supplies despite the fact that he was no longer the Potions Master on-call. He'd helped with the repairs to the castle. He'd revised his curriculum for Defense a hundred times if he'd done it once. Hell, he'd even begun drawing in the bloody sketchbook to keep his mind occupied.

Finally, September had arrived. He no longer relied on his cane, the vertigo having passed. His neck was still stiff with bandages that encouraged his neck to heal with minimal scarring, but the tall collar of his frock coat mostly covered them.

He'd caught himself sketching Granger with his charcoals more than once. Those pages had promptly been thrown into the fire even if he'd had to conjure one to do so.

Before he knew it, the students were making their tired ways out of the Hall to their dormitories. The sheer normality of it seemed to take hold of his guts and yank them out to have a look. It was all he could do to make it to the Slytherin common room to give his usual welcoming speech, with a few additions addressing recent events, to his House before he locked himself in his rooms.

"Why?" The word tore out of him without him meaning for it to. It wasn't addressed to anybody specifically; the person the question was for was dead. "Why would you do that? Why would you save me? Why would you _die_?"


	3. Reversus

Hermione's knees met cold, unyielding stone and she fell forward, her palms smacking against the stone as well. She remained like that for several seconds, not sure what had happened. One moment she'd been on her back in the Shrieking Shack, body wracked with such pain, the next she'd been on her hands and knees, feeling perfectly fine but for the chill of the stone beneath her.

The whispers were coming from behind her, filling the entire room. The way they echoed suggested the room was vaulted, but she didn't want to open her eyes to find out. She was terrified. For all her contemplation of death, she hadn't much contemplated any sort of afterlife. In the back of her mind, she'd believed in it, but she'd never let herself stray too far down the path those thoughts directed her towards.

The whispers stopped abruptly, as though somebody had cast _silencio_ over them, making Hermione twitch her head up, forgetting to keep her eyes closed. Immediately, she gasped.

She was in the Death Chamber. She was kneeling on the dais in front of the Veil; it was fluttering in the phantom wind behind her, the ghostly cloth brushing her ankles. It reminded her of the way Harry's invisibility cloak had always felt against her ankles when they'd hidden beneath it. Every step of the amphitheater-like room was lit in bluish-purple light, as though hundred of Muggle black lights had been installed since her last visit. The light came from runes, previously invisible when they hadn't been lit up, in each tier, each from a different alphabet; her mind wouldn't process what they meant.

It occurred to her that she was completely naked in the same moment that she realized she was not alone in the Chamber.

_Do you know what your last thought was, Hermione Granger?_

"Pardon?" Hermione gasped, staring at the magnificent bird that sat on the lowest tier of the amphitheater, at her eye level directly across from her. Fawkes cocked his head to one side in a decidedly bird-like way.

_You were concerned that your death wouldn't be able to repay a man who had shown you nothing short of cruelty in all your interactions._

"Snape?" her mind was reeling, trying to circle back and remember what the bird was talking about. Trying to understand how it was the phoenix was talking to her in the first place. "Snape may have said cruel things, but his actions said differently. He saved our lives so many times…"

_And, in your dying thoughts, you hoped he would live; not just survive, but live._

"Well, he deserved it. I mean…"

_You were not wondering if you'd let your cat out, or how your friends would react to your death. You were not cursing the very breath of the woman who attacked from behind and left you to die._

"Well, all that's rather petty, isn't it? If you're going to die, what's the use in worrying about your cat?"

_Precisely._

Hermione blinked at the bird and he blinked back.

"I don't understand."

_I've chosen you, Hermione Granger. Follow me._

"But I haven't any clothes," Hermione said as she stood, covering herself as best as she could with her hands. She noted absently that her familiar scars—the bluish-purple, vein-looking scar that was a reminder of Dolohov's silent curse during her last visit to the Department of Mysteries; the faded white mark on her right kneecap from when her father had taught her to ride a bike; the reminders of little knicks and burns from Potions on her hands and forearms—were all missing.

_That is our first stop. Besides, nobody can see you but me._

"Oh."

The phoenix led her out of the Death Chamber, then through a black door that could've been any of its neighbors when the room stopped spinning. Before she knew it, the bird had led her to the main atrium. The Statue of Magical Brethren had been replaced by a large white pillar with _Memoria_ written in raised letters at the top. The bird allowed her a moment's distraction as she gazed at the list of all those, wizard or Muggle, killed in the Dark Lord Wars, as the writing on the pillar called the recent wars against Voldemort.

Hermione gasped when she found her own name on the pillar between Nymphadora Tonks and Percy Weasley. She knew far too many people on the list.

It was raining in London when they left the Ministry building, the cool water sending a chill through Hermione. She was increasingly insecure about her nakedness, but none of the Muggles she passed seemed to know she was there, though they moved to avoid walking into her when it was necessary. They didn't notice Fawkes, brilliant red and gold plumage and all, either.

The walk was short, but long enough to leave Hermione's feet feeling a bit frostbitten from the contact with the cold, wet stones, the rest of her simply shivering with wet, covered in goose flesh.

"Why don't my feet hurt?" she asked Fawkes as he led her through a hidden door into a cemetery she hadn't noticed from the street. The grass was ridiculously green, standing out against the blunt brown of the mud that the rain had churned into being.

_You don't have feet yet to hurt, my dear._

It was said in such a way that Hermione would've felt ridiculous asking him to make sense of it for her. Instead, she followed the phoenix's lazy flight to the far edge of the cemetery. He landed on a newer-looking tomb, low to the ground with a curly-haired angel standing at the head. There were flowers set around the base of the tomb, as though whoever was buried there had had many loved ones who needed the closure of a few petals to leave at the graveside.

Hermione gasped when she finally stood at the foot of the tomb, looking down at the inscription:

_Hermione Jean Granger_

_September 19, 1979 – May 12, 1997_

_She was fine as life could be_

_Hath crossed alone the narrow sea._

_Why ye fear the distant shore_

_Since she we loved has gone before._

Hermione frowned down at her own grave. One thing concerning death she and Harry hadn't talked about had been their final wishes. She didn't know where he'd liked to be buried—if at all, maybe he wanted to be cremated—or how he wanted to be remembered in stone—be it a gravestone or a tomb such as this. She had to give them props for getting it mostly right; she'd always thought a tomb was easier to see than a regular grave. The angel that looked a bit like her might have been a step too far, though. And the epitaph was just silly. She'd always thought to be a rebel as she'd never been in life and request "well this sucks" be carved below her name, but the classic and much used "remember friend as you walk by" poem had seemed suitable to her as well.

Further contemplation of her grave was ended by a sharp pain in her lungs. Terrified, she glanced around for the source of the pain, anybody to cast a spell, but found that the place was empty but for she and Fawkes. The phoenix was watching her with a mournful, almost apologetic look.

The pain intensified, burning through her lungs and up her throat. Her bones felt as though they were on fire. Her torso erupted in random bursts of flaming, searing pain. She felt as though she were being stretched every which way but had long since overextended, meanwhile the phantom blaze licked at her nerve endings. The coppery taste of blood rose in the back of her throat.

She fell to her knees, leaning against her grave. Grating coughs wracked her body, blood splattering the base of the tomb. Then, as it had before, the spots of black in her vision took over the spots of reality, and there was no more.

* * *

A/N: the epitaph was taken from the tomb of Melinda L. Hulls, found on /epitaphs


	4. Lugeo

"Why don't you just draw the girl, Severus?" Minerva asked, glancing up at him nonchalantly. All the professor of Defense did was narrow his eyes further, intensifying the glare he'd worn since he'd returned to his office to find the headmistress sitting at his desk with his hated, but well-used, sketchbook.

"What are you talking about?" he ground out. He was standing across the desk from her, just returned from his usual patrol. All he wanted was a finger or two of firewhiskey before bed. But, no. The woman had gone through his things, found his bloody _sketchbook_, and was attempting to psychoanalyze him or the like.

Minerva, undeterred, laid the sketchbook flat between them and began flipping through the pages so that he could see which she was viewing.

A study alcove in the Hogwarts library, a window seat in a pocket behind a suit of armor not far from the Transfigurations classroom, the hallway outside his Potions classroom, the House tables in the Great Hall, his old Potions classroom, his Defense classroom, the kitchen at Grimmauld Place, a nook in the library at Grimmauld Place… He drew places, not people. While he wasn't a poor artist in the least—he had a steady hand and had actually done a bit of willing sketching when he'd been young—the drawings improved as he'd gotten back into practice; each familiar setting had been haunting his dreams, as empty as they were in his drawings, though, since he'd awoken in St. Mungo's to answer the Aurors' questions about his survival, his duplicity, and Granger's death.

Minerva quirked her eyebrow at him as though she'd just discovered he had a secret love for Pygmy Puffs or some such nonsense and wanted him to reveal further details on threat of telling the staff.

"What are you on about, woman?" he ground out, knowing better than to attempt any more diversionary tactics when she pulled that particular expression out of her arsenal. He sank into the chair across the desk usually reserved for students and looked at her. She faltered only momentarily.

"Hermione Granger."

Severus scowled. She said the girl's name as if it didn't hurt to so much as think of her. He'd sat through plenty of Minerva's sobbing evenings to know that it did.

"What about her?" he feigned nonchalance; if she wanted to end up in tears again, far be it from him to prevent her.

"You've drawn the places Hermione always favored," the elderly witch, even older since the end of the latest war, said, flipping the pages back to the first and proceeding. "Her spot in the library, the place she always went when she wanted to be free of her friends but not study, the place where she queued up for your class, the place where she took her meals, the places where you taught her, the place where you ate across the table from her, the place she spent most of her time at Grimmauld Place…" she looked up at him, hiding her surprise to see him looking so shocked.

He hadn't realized.

It was so plain, though. It was a common fact among the professors that Hermione Granger spent too much time in the library. The other students, no matter their year, knew which out-of-the-way table and semi-comfortable chair she favored while studying in the library, and Madame Pince had made the rest of the staff well aware, complaining about a Gryffindor bookworm. He'd had to shoo her out of the hiding spot behind the suit of armor more times than he could count—he'd even taken to stalking past it at the beginning of his rounds during her sixth year loudly enough so that she could get herself back to her common room before he made his more thorough check on his way back. He'd insulted her worse than he'd ever meant to outside his Potions classroom, and he'd watched her shine more than he'd thought possible in the Defense classroom. It was true as well that his place at the table at Girmmauld Place had been near to her more often than not, though it was by no particular design. And she had indeed spent more time in the library at the ancient house of Black than anybody else, even him.

"Severus," Minerva said, and it was all he could do not to leap up and start shooting off hexes, he hadn't realized she'd gotten up and was standing next to him, a hand on his shoulder. "You have to mourn her."

"I have to _what_?" he asked, incredulous.

"_Mourn_ her, Severus. At least acknowledge that her death has affected you!" she spun away from him and was pacing now. Severus merely watched, perplexed. "I have known you since you were eleven years old. You have had a hard life. You have had to do so much. And I am grateful that you survived it all and did so well."

He scowled at her. Her pacing slowed until she was just standing off to one side, watching him as she spoke.

"But you compartmentalize, Severus. You separate things, events, and especially emotions. Don't you deny it, either! I _know_ you have emotions," she glared. He remained silent. "You cannot continue this way. You are terrorizing the students more than you have since Harry Potter's first year, even your own House! You are too thin, you are too quiet, and I know for a fact that you've been drinking more than you should."

At that Severus had to look elsewhere, focusing on the stack of unmarked essays—half a meter from the second years on the dangers of boggarts—instead of his employer. She sighed softly, somewhere between frustration and compassion, and moved forward to put her hand on his shoulder again.

"Draw the girl, Severus. Maybe it will help, maybe it won't. In any case; either mourn or pull yourself together," she paused just long enough to make him almost suspicious that she was about to give him more ridiculous advice. "It's not as if you liked her, anyway."

He exploded.

"I didn't _like_ her? How would you know? What would it matter, anyway? She obviously liked me well enough to come back to that bloody shack and patch me up," his hand was at his neck, stretching his collar down to reveal the mottled scar, purple and red and raised and ugly against the pale skin of his neck. "Doesn't matter whether I sodding liked her or not. Not to mention that she was the most brilliant student to pass through the gates of Hogwarts in _decades_. Not to mention that it was her wits alone that pulled Potter through to the end; that the entire Wizarding world owes her their lives and she is no longer around to accept their pitiful appreciation. Not to mention that _I_ had been more terrible to her than anybody else, yet she came back for me. _Me_.

"Don't think I haven't heard the conversations that stop when I enter the staff room, Minerva," he was standing now. He was just taller than the headmistress but he seemed to tower above her, fists clenched, glaring down at her. "They wonder _why_ she would go back for me. They talk about how much _potential_ was lost, how _sad_ it is, how _unfitting_. They ask why Fate would be so cruel.

"They won't blame me aloud, to my face, but their looks say enough. I was the Death Eater; I was caught out. I was to _die for it_. They blame me for not dying, they blame me for surviving long enough to lure her back to that _fucking_ shack and distracting her while she was attacked. They blame me for not being able to do anything—for sitting and watching while a woman that I'd spent years smiling at in public caught down their dear, innocent Gryffindor Princess. For _watching_, Minerva, and not _doing_; she fell and she bled, and Bellatrix left, and she kept bleeding, and she forced herself to keep breathing, and she would've done so except she began choking on her own blood. I didn't lift a finger. I didn't save her, like they tell me I'd promised to. I didn't more than blink as the life slowly faded from her body, as her _blood_ soaked into the hem of my robe where it was closest to her."

He paused, attempting to reign in his rage without success; the headmistress was watching him, wide-eyed. Looking at him as though she'd never seen him before.

"Do you know what they're calling me, Minerva?" he asked, waiting 'til she made to shake her head, her mouth opening to tell him 'no.' "They're calling me a lecher. They're saying that she must've been sleeping with me, must've been Imperiused to do my will and come to my aide. That _something unnatural_ must have been occurring between their _favored_ one and myself. Pervert. Pedophile. Taking advantage of a little girl and discarding her like a whore when I'd finished; letting her die in my stead after she'd run to my rescue, not to be bothered to lift a finger except, perhaps, to get my cloak out of all the blood."

For a moment, they looked at each other. Minerva was still at a loss. Severus' voice was low and quiet, at its most dangerous.

"I was not at liberty to _like_ her. She was Muggle-born, she was not a Slytherin, she was a friend of _Harry Potter_. She was the enemy in every way, shape and form.

"If anybody had known that I didn't _detest_ the girl, she would've been dead before her fifth year," he growled. His temper was winding down into exhaustion, he could feel; he was glad for it.

"They can blame me all they want. Merlin knows I blame myself… I do not know why she came back for me. I do not know why she would want to help me. Barty Crouch, Jr. made sure Potter's grade-level was near immune to the Imperius during their fourth year, though, and I am no lecher. I do not _understand_ why she'd bother. I do know that she was focused on putting me back together when she was attacked, and that was entirely my fault."

"Severus…"

"I'll bloody-well compartmentalize all I want, thank you, Minerva," he said, turning from her swiftly, leaving the essays behind and heading straight for his private quarters. "And don't try to fucking tell me that I'm drinking _too much_."

He slammed the door behind him, the noise making the headmistress flinch.


	5. Medicor

Hermione felt like a bruise. Every inch of her felt as though it could be riled to pain at the least touch.

Instead of moving, Hermione watched the dust motes in the yellow light streaming through the high windows across the room. She was on a cot in the corner of a small kitchen. The windows were high and large, meant for catching that sunlight, situated above a high countertop. It was a fairly regular kitchen so far as they type of kitchen she was used to went, a Muggle kitchen with wizard touches. The refrigerator did not hum, but its contents were cold; there were no plugs or signs of electricity yet there were several small appliances; there were candles and oil lamps instead of electric lights with switches; and there was a half-full bottle of Magical Mess Remover on the kitchen table. The table itself was wood, probably handcrafted, a very wizarding habit.

She couldn't feel any magic in the place, though. It didn't feel as though wizards lived in the little house—and it would be a little house, considering the size of the combined kitchen-dining room.

_A Squib, maybe?_

The only magic she could feel was that which was growing within her. Her own magic rejuvenating now that she had a physical body again—and she knew she did, because said physical body hurt as she hadn't felt on her walk from the Death Chamber to the strange cemetery that contained her grave.

_So I _did_ die, but now I'm not? Where's Fawkes?_

* * *

The next time she woke, her last conscious question was answered: Fawkes was perched on the back of one of the wooden chairs that matched the table, watching her.

"H'lo, Fawkes," she said, her throat alerting her the moment she stopped speaking that it wasn't in her best interest to do that again.

_You sound like a bullfrog_, Fawkes informed her, cocking his head in that oh-so-bird-like way again.

"Oh, good; you're awake!" an unfamiliar voice said from the doorway. The man, she presumed he was the Squib who owned the kitchen and homey dining table, appeared and bustled into the kitchen, pouring her a glass of water from the tap without noticing that she'd sat bolt upright at the sight of him, wand hand free of the blankets and ready for action despite her lack of a wand.

Fawkes was chuckling in her head. She glared at him for a moment, but then focused on the strange man.

"Here, drink this down; you sounded positively awful. I'll just pop into the bath and get a potion out of the cabinet that should help you…" he'd already disappeared again. Hermione watched after him, sipping at the water tentatively then downing it when she tasted nothing but plain-old tap water.

_Feign amnesia_, Fawkes instructed, shuffling for a better grip on the back of the chair as the man reentered his kitchen, vial of easily-recognizable potion for sore throats in hand. Hermione had a vague idea that the potion would do no good, as it wasn't her throat that was actually in trouble so much as her vocal chords themselves, but she took it with a small smile and a nod of thanks anyway.

"There you are, now; we'll get you right in no time."

* * *

Mr. Warwick Kobb was a very nice man, the Squib caretaker of the cemetery where she'd been buried, but he was a bit of a nutter, starved for social contact. He had a huge, shaggy, floppy gray dog that he called Jack even though it was female; there was even a litter of gangly, shaggy, adorable puppies in a basket under the kitchen table to prove it.

Kobb was short, barrel-chested, had biceps that reminded her a bit of Popeye, and a personality that reminded her of Molly Weasley. Of course, thinking of the Weasley matriarch only made her more anxious to return to her life. Fawkes was ever-cautious, though.

Besides insisting she feign amnesia, he also urged her to stay put in the caretaker's hut for the time being. Much like his old master, the bird perpetuated an aura of enigma. In her current state, she wasn't prepared to branch away from even his most ridiculous—such as the seemingly needless amnesia—instructions.

Her first week back on the living side of the Veil was dominated by three simple factors: pain, paranoia, and magic. Her body, every deep tissue, every nerve ending, hurt. She moved and her body flared red hot with the pain of it. Added on top of that was the paranoia, not knowing what was going on, hardly having to feign the amnesia Fawkes had instructed her to for the confusion, only remembering her reflexes and worries of wartime.

The small ray of hope was the magic. It surrounded her. When she was still, she could feel it, cool and calming, inside of her, easing the tension and the blazing pain. She could feel it wafting off of Fawkes in intangible waves, taste it in the tears he added to the glasses of water Mr. Kobb left by her bedside every night.

Hermione forced herself out of bed on the seventh day of what Fawkes referred to as her encore at life. She didn't find that as amusing as he did, but that didn't stop him any.

She only walked to the bathroom and back, but her body protested the entire journey. Her feet ached from the unfamiliar sensation of carrying her weight. Her hips and leg muscles hurt from the unfamiliarity of the movements of walking. Her back hurt from being forced to hold its own against gravity for less than five minutes. Her arms didn't hurt, but they felt like lead weights, and her shoulders ached from the floppy, swinging motions as her arms dangled uselessly when she moved. Her head spun with vertigo, her stomach revolted.

When she finally made it back to her cot, she fell down on top of the quilt and slept out the rest of the day, oblivious to Fawkes' internal _tsk_ing at her impatience.

* * *

Hermione woke the next day, her eighth day of encore, a Tuesday, and was surprised to find that she felt almost normal. When she sat up there was a slight ache, but not the all-encompassing pain of the past week. A bit of vertigo, but no nausea. She didn't feel good, but she didn't feel bad. A bit like she had the flu but was beginning to get over it.

On shaky legs, she walked around the kitchen, getting herself a glass of water and sitting at the table to drink it after Fawkes had put a few tears into it. She was sitting there, sipping and stroking the bird's head affectionately, puppies gallivanting around her ankles, when Mr. Kobb returned from his morning walk around the cemetery, checking the graves and the plants and the entrance.

"It's good to see you up," Mr. Kobb said, pouring himself a glass of water and joining her at the table, his eyes focused on the phoenix sitting on the back of the chair next to her. It hadn't missed Hermione's notice that Fawkes did not let the man touch him; however, he didn't seem to have any qualms about her. She was too tired, too thirsty, to ask questions, but she was curious.

"I'm feeling much better."

There was silence for a moment and it occurred to Hermione that it was the first time she'd spoken a full sentence in Mr. Kobb's presence.

"Where am I?" she finally asked, downing the last of her water and sitting back in her chair, steeling herself to have a conversation. Fawkes hopped from the back of the adjacent chair to the back of hers, practically on her shoulder.

"This cemetery doesn't have a name," Mr. Kobb answered after a moment. "A place for witches and wizards to be buried and rest in peace. We're in London."

Hermione nodded, but stopped when it brought the vertigo back in force. Beside her, Fawkes chuckled his bird chuckle, the sound tinkling through the room with the usual ethereal quality of a phoenix. Mr. Kobb looked decidedly uncomfortable.

* * *

Hermione stood in the kitchen, now wearing an old robe of Mr. Kobb's dead wife instead of the nightgown from the same deceased owner, looking at her bleeding finger. The blood bubbled up on the side of her index finger, leaking out between the edges of the tiny mark she'd made when her hand had slipped while she was cutting a potato for their dinner. Once she'd regained her feet she'd shortly regained her appetite, much to Mr. Kobb's delight. She had also remembered more than a few things her mother and Mrs. Weasley had taught her about kitchens and cooking, and had quickly taken over meal duties from Mr. "Soup or pasta?" Kobb.

Still looking at the finger, she turned and looked at Fawkes, who was perched on the back of his usual chair, watching her. She blinked at him. He blinked back.

Still holding the knife, she stuck her finger in her mouth as she sank down to the floor against the cabinet. It hit her rather forcefully that she could die again. Her own mortality terrified her; she'd already died once. It hadn't been pleasant. She could remember every detail, every strained moment, ever choking gasp for breath. There was very little she wouldn't do to never have to experience those things again.

She pulled her finger out of her mouth and looked at it, the terror, horror, quickly turning to awe. Her finger was perfectly fine. There wasn't even a scab or a scar where the blood had been.

"What is this? What's happened to me?" Hermione asked, having a clear memory of a youth spent explaining to adults that she bruised easily, bled a lot, it was nothing to worry about. No, it wasn't hemophilia; she'd be fine. It was simply the temperament of her body. Fawkes quirked his head at her.

_This is your encore, dear girl. Expect things to be different._

In the coming week she discovered exactly what sort of understatement that turned out to be.

Over the course of a few conversations with Mr. Kobb, she discovered herself to be rather out of emotions. Her range of feeling concerned only those that had snuck up on her by surprise since she'd begun her encore—paranoia, terror, confusion, hope, relief, impatience, horror, awe. The newest addition was hysteria, since she'd spent the morning sitting in Mr. Kobb's bathroom hyperventilating after she'd woken from her nightmare, the memory of Bellatrix Lestrange stabbing her. She could still feel the knife in her when she closed her eyes; could feel the blood seeping out of the wound over her fingers.

Panicking—another for the list—Hermione tore off her clothes and stood in front of the bathroom mirror, looking at herself for the first time since she'd returned through the Veil.

Her body was not as emaciated as it had been when she'd died—spending so many months living off of wild mushrooms hadn't had a healthy effect on her appearance. Her cheeks were still sunken and her ribs, collarbones, and hip bones very clearly visible, but she didn't look like she was likely to waste away momentarily—a bit corpse-like, but more along the lines of what supermodels strive for instead of anorexics. She had all the scar and marks of her past year's worth of tortures in place as well. Dolohov's vein-looking purple scar slashed across her middle, beginning just beneath her left breast and cutting across her torso to end over her right hip bone. The sixteen stab wounds she'd received in the hour prior to her death were shiny white marks scattered across her belly. The brand on her left forearm was a bit pink but mostly skin-toned, the skull shape raised ever so slightly but not uncomfortable to the touch. The single scar from her childhood over her right knee remained. The comfortable splattering of tiny, almost unnoticeable scars on her hands and forearms were in place. There were softening calluses on her hands and feet from shoes she didn't own anymore, and from holding a quill and wand.

For some reason, the scars comforted her. The wraithlike paleness to her skin and fluttering curls didn't worry her. They were normal, they were her usual. The worst that could happen had already happened. She'd already died. It could only happen again. Now she knew what to expect.

Relief. Acceptance.

Putting her clothes back on, Hermione crawled back onto her cot in the kitchen and pulled the quilt over her head, ready to face the nightmares again.

* * *

_The Shrieking Shack faded as the black spots expanding to encompass her vision. The pain, the warm blood pooling around her and cooling, the fiery unnaturalness in her mangled bones, all of it faded to nothing, to black blankness. She could only hear her own struggle for breath, Snape's raspy inhale and exhale, and the sporadic thud of her heartbeat. Her gurgling slowed to a stop, the heartbeat becoming more erratic, uneven. It echoed in the blackness; her entire being was the beat of that overtaxed heart. She couldn't even feel the terror anymore. _

_Then all was silent._

_There was nothing._

_And then there was the light everybody who'd ever had a near-death experience spoke of. The light in the darkness expanded, grew until there was no darkness. _

_Unlike the stories, she didn't find lost loved ones waiting to welcome her into the fold, she didn't meet Saint Peter or see any pearly gates. She was simply surrounded by light and freedom and peace. There were no worries, no consequences, no repercussions, nobody trying to kill her. There was nobody. There was nothing._

_She drifted in the calm. Eventually, there was somebody. There were a lot of somebodies. She was drifting along with people she knew who had gone before—Dumbledore, Sirius, her maternal grandparents, Tonks, students from Hogwarts whose names she didn't know. Hedwig soared lazily around the drifting souls, soundlessly. Dobby was there, too, and Harry's parents. _

_She understood._

_The blank lightness solidified around her until the familiar faces weren't drifting anymore. There was no gravity, no physics dictating the order of things, but they were all in a great library. The shelves were filled to burst with books and seemed to continue up and up and up, books switching places at will. There were alcoves between the never ending stacks for sitting and lounging and reading. Dumbledore and her maternal grandparents shared an alcove for awhile until the headmaster set his book aside and wandered off to find another, the first floating lazily back along the rows to its home and shelving itself with a content sigh._

_Harry's parents, Sirius, and Tonks sat in an alcove playing cards. Hermione joined them for awhile, winning three hand before a book without a title caught her attention._

_Then the most beautiful sound filled the light library. The stacks lost their shapes, everything fading back to swirls of undefined light. All those drifting stopped and turned, looking towards the speck of gray far in the distance. Hedwig spiraled toward it, but then lost interest and looped off on a different course. Sirius and the Potters returned their attention to the flat bit of light between them and James Potter produced another deck of cards from the ether. Hermione smiled and had half a mind to join them again before Dumbledore floated into view, meeting her eyes for the first time since she'd died._

_They looked at each other for a moment. She'd come to hate him for his manipulation in the past year, but she couldn't blame him for it. He'd organized things to save the majority of the population, Muggle and wizarding. He nodded to her and drifted away, leaving her to drift toward the gray._

_As she got closer, the melody became louder and more precise. She recognized it as phoenix song. The gray materialized into the Veil, fluttering in the phantom wind that existed between worlds, the tug of the curtain towards oblivion and the pull of life. _

_The phoenix song resolved itself into a musical voice without a source. "_You died before your time, Hermione Granger_," it said. _

_Hermione found that she didn't mind. She began drifting back away from the Veil; the fluttering grayness made her uncomfortable. It reminded her of pain and uncertainty, of consequences and stress. _

"You were used most horribly by a witch who didn't deserve the life yours gifted."

_She turned to face the Veil again. Memories tickled at the back of her consciousness. Memories of warm blood and righteousness. Of betrayal and trickery. Of sacrifice and hope._

"She will send others in her place. She will continue to do harm,_" the song that wasn't a song said. _

_An itch began at the base of Hermione's soul and made its way up to her top. _

She_._

_Bellatrix Lestrange._

_The madwoman who had spent so much time close to Tom Riddle, Voldemort. He had been too close to the Veil for too long, spent too much of his life trying to acquire more time instead of using what he had. He'd striven for immortality when it wasn't his due. He'd given over to Darkness, that opposite the peace of the light, that third side of the Veil._

_Bellatrix had been a brilliant witch—cunning, arrogant and wicked, but brilliant—before she'd lost her mind. She learned things in her madness, though. Learned from her Dark Lord's overlooked options that had been relegated to his underlings. _

_She was supposed to die in the Battle of Hogwarts. It was the course of her life. The end of her madness. _

_Instead, she had intended to send Severus Snape, the traitor, in her place. She hadn't, though. Hermione had intervened. _

_Bellatrix had practiced the curse before, on many Muggle-borns and other captives. It hadn't worked then, but she hadn't been called by the Veil then. When she'd branded Hermione for the taking, the curse had worked. Bellatrix had escaped the Grim and Hermione had found her peace._

"You can right this."

_Hermione didn't feel compelled to leave the peace of the light. She turned from the Veil, only to find that there was a wall of drifting souls behind her. They were watching, listening, muttering. Drawn by the song though they couldn't understand the words—phoenixes were life, and these souls no longer had living bodies. _

_Hermione considered. Images tailed each other through her consciousness. Those Bellatrix would kill, Severus Snape again, innocents, children. Always the Grim would be after her; her number had come up and she was trading it off. Inevitably, she'd be caught, but there would be too many innocents through the Veil before then. _

Destiny is not what you think_, it occurred to her. _Destiny is like directions by landmarks, not the exact street address.

_Then she drifted toward the Veil, turned and nodded goodbye to the souls who would wait behind, and went through._

She woke to find that it was the middle of the afternoon. The yellow sunlight and swirling dust motes of her first days spent in the cot were present. Warm and alive, the light of a different texture than that she'd just remembered.

She turned her head and sought the phoenix that had called her back from beyond. He was watching her.

"How does one go about living when she knows the meaning of her life?" she asked him, but he didn't answer.


	6. Duco

Severus looked down at the sketchbook in his lap and sighed before finishing off the last of his whiskey. He'd sat down to draw and he'd drawn the Hospital Wing. Now that Minerva had planted the thought in his head, though, he realized that he'd drawn the bed that Granger had been put in her second year when she'd been Petrified. Before that, as well, when she'd used the wrong sort of hair in the Polyjuice Potion.

He threw the sketchbook across the room, adding to the mess. He'd all but destroyed his sitting room after his conversation with Minerva, smashing chairs into walls, dropping books off shelves, shredding the rug and curtains. There nearly a week's worth of unmarked homework, some parchments shredded while others were nearly whole, strewn about the room.

And he was out of firewhiskey.

* * *

He couldn't say that he'd ever understood Hermione Granger. She'd come from a different world than he had—not just the Muggle world, which he'd only had the barest experience in growing up, but she'd come from a happy world. She'd had friends during school if not before. People had liked her. He'd never had that. He'd killed the only person who'd ever liked him.

Severus paused, contemplating the newest charcoal sketch in his book.

At some point, he'd gotten quite good at drawing. The face that looked out at him from the sketchbook looked exactly as he remembered Granger to look. Big, dark, thoughtful eyes stared out at him through long lashes and beneath a head of frizzy corkscrew ringlets. High cheekbones, a small mouth with altogether attractively curved lips. A strong jaw, thin neck, conservative robes. A spattering of freckles dusting across her nose and cheeks. A small mole on the underside of her jaw.

_You spent too many years as a spy, old man_, he told himself, looking down at the likeness on the parchments, tapping the butt of his charcoal pencil against the top of the drawing absently. _No _normal_ person would remember these little details._

Of course, he remembered how the freckles had stood out as the blood had drained from her body onto the floor. He remembered that the frizzy curls had been matted from going unwashed, that the particularly rebellious tendrils that had taken to framing her face had been stuck to her with sweat. Her eyes had been terrified but still determined. Her mouth had hung open, an attempt to pull more air into her blocked lungs, lips as pale as her skin and marred by a bit of blood trailing out of her mouth. Her robes had been loose on her, revealing just how long it had been since she'd had a proper meal when Bellatrix had stabbed her and the wetness of her blood made the cloth cling to her.


	7. Sepulcrum

_Soul and body are not supposed to be split_, Fawkes informed her, sounding tired as his voice echoed in her head. Or maybe she was just tired and she was ghosting that exhaustion into his tone.

"Contrary to the generally Gryffindor way of thinking, there are _reasons_ things are the way they are. People are not supposed to return from the dead," Hermione whispered back, looking at her right palm. She'd been living her encore for a month and a half now, and her body was healed enough for her magic to be controllable. She didn't need a wand. The magic simply responded to her nonverbal commands, using her hand as it once had her wand, channeling out of her fingertips.

She'd never felt so close to magic, nor so far from the wizarding world.

When the sun rose, Hermione rose as well and had breakfast ready for Mr. Kobb when he finally woke. After they'd eaten and the dishes were done, he took her for a tediously slow walk around the cemetery. He told her about funerals; he remembered every funeral since he'd become caretaker and knew the stories about quite a few from before his time. He paused in front of her own grave for a long moment before telling her that he'd found her slumped on the edge of it—she still claimed not to remember—and told her that the girl who was entombed in the stone had been a hero, the Chosen One's girlfriend; the cemetery had never been so full before her funeral. War heroes he recognized from the paper, the entire staff of Hogwarts, lots of redheaded Weasleys.

She'd barely managed to excuse herself back to her cot in the kitchen before the silent tears began falling. She didn't sleep again for two days, and added grief and gratitude, sadness, wonder and surprise to her emotional arsenal.


	8. Insignitus

Severus, for the first time since he'd finished answering the Auror's questions in St. Mungo's, was having a good look at his Dark Mark. He sat in his preferred wingback in front of his fire, which had smoldered down into embers that left the room vulnerable to the winter chill. His left arm was on the armrest, turned around so that he could examine the tattoo.

The Mark had faded to a sickly gray color, only the outline remaining vivid black, upon the Dark Lord's death. There had been a good deal of discussion in many different wizarding circles, considering that the Mark had faded to nothing upon the first fall when the Killing Curse had bounced back off Potter. No explanation had been discovered, though—most of the Death Eaters were dead, anyway, the rest imprisoned. Bellatrix and the entire Malfoy family, Macnair, and the ever-charming Yaxley were all missing, though Yaxley was presumed dead from a curse Granger was suspected to have hit him with during the Battle of Hogwarts. Nobody could be certain, as Granger was rather dead herself.

Thoughts like that, the flippant reference to her death, still made his skin crawl. He'd fallen into the habit of forcing them, as it seemed expected of him to _be_ flippant about her death; if not flippant, than not quite so sensitive, at least. She was a year gone, after all.

In any case, his was the only Dark Mark available for ready examination for any purpose of his own or the Ministry, and he certainly wasn't volunteering to be the government's test subject. If they wanted one of those they could deal with their qualms and pull somebody from Azkaban.

The Mark didn't feel evil anymore. It felt like ink against his arm, like a simple tattoo. It represented evil and guilt and humiliation and Darkness and failure, which led him to keep it covered even when he was alone, to avert his eyes when it was necessary to leave it open to the air.

It also reminded him of the brand Bellatrix had marked Granger with as she'd killed her. Marked in her own way, one that was more of a scar than Severus' could ever be, though he felt it marked a mistake just as any scar did. A little white line from a knife to remind him not to touch a bare blade to his skin, a Dark Mark to remind him not to be arrogant and power-hungry.

Karma was making up for his survival double-time lately, as Minerva Flooed through and found him there in his chair, tracing the darker outline with a contemplative scowl on his face. Unlike her predecessor, Minerva was able to hold her curiosity in check and simply took the wingback across from him and tended to the fire while she waited from him to say something. Albus would've launched into a series of theories and questions without a second's thought, no matter where Severus' own thoughts might have been taking him.

It was a most pleasant change that the only person who, by the law of the castle, could fit through the loophole in his wards wasn't so Gryffindor that she felt the need to press on ahead before his poor Slytherin calculating caught up.

-

Severus jerked awake, rolling in a smooth motion out from beneath his sheets to stand stock-still beside his bed. His blood raged through his veins, his body alert in more ways than the usual in the wake of his dream.

He'd dreamt about her. He'd been dreaming about her since the beginning of the summer, since the year anniversary of her death.

Some of the dreams were nightmares. He witnessed her bleeding out, gagging, dying, again and again, just as helpless as he'd been during the actual experience, though sometimes he could move and did, trying to save her but to no avail. She always looked at him in the last moments of the nightmare, though; when she'd died, she'd looked at him with an unbelievable, unexplainable satisfied expression. In the dreams, her gaze accused him.

Worse were the dreams that weren't nightmares. The dreams where she was still young and whole and in his classes as he verbally abused her again and again. The dreams where she was middle-aged, had survived the war, and had her own Quidditch team of Weasley brats. The dreams that he, for some inexplicable reason, met with her on Sunday evenings to discuss her latest published work and his Potions research.

Lately, though, the regular sort of dreams and nightmares had faded away to what he hated to think of as wet dreams. Wet dreams, a teenage term his father had sneered at him every time he's soiled his sheets in the summers, about a former student that he'd watched die. They made his blood rush, set his heart pounding and his erection throbbing; he always woke soft and spent, soiled, guilty.

This latest version of the dreams had him standing beside the bed fighting for composure, though there was nobody to appear composed before and the stone floor was freezing beneath his feet.

_Is it possible to fall in love with a memory?_

The new dreams weren't nightmares, though they disturbed him just about as much. The new dreams featured him and Granger in a decidedly domestic setting, a setting he'd never even considered placing himself within.

They were married. They were relaxed. They sat by a fire and read, or brewed in a shared lab. They went for walks around the Black Lake but there was no Hogwarts on the horizon. They went out in public and had lunch at the Leaky Cauldron and nobody looked at them, either of them, as though there were anything odd or insulting about it.

They went to bed together at night and he held her to his chest after, and she purred and luxuriated as she fell asleep in his arms.

_Always falling for the unattainable woman_, he berated himself. _First the friends-only, taken Lily; now a dead girl half your age. What the hell's wrong with you, Severus Snape?_

Cursing himself, he downed half a vial of Dreamless Sleep from his medicine cabinet before crawling back between the sheets.


	9. Molior

Mr. Kobb was very kind when it came time for her to take her leave of him and his somewhat creepy—in a Muggle horror movie sort of way—home. He saw her off with the best of wishes—really, it almost seemed he was looking forward to returning to his life of solitude, she wondered if he was secretly a monk—and a knapsack of supplies. His dead wife, who had also been a Squib, had left Muggle and wizard clothes behind, which she had her pick from but had to be resized to fit. He also gave her a map of wizarding and Muggle London, which was something she'd never looked at before, and a sum of Muggle money—his needs were seen to by the Ministry, so she didn't feel badly to take it.

Armed with clothes and toiletries and dressed to look like a University student, Hermione walked away from the cemetery in which she was buried, intent on finding herself a new life.

-

Hermione was only very slightly guilty about Confuding her new landlady in order to procure the third floor apartment in London. The woman's name was Dee Williams; she was a middle-aged Muggle with empty-nest syndrome despite the fact that she'd never married, let alone had children.

Dee's building was one of those quaint red brick jobs, short and antiquated-looking among similar, almost identical, if a bit taller, brick buildings on the cobbled street. It was quite a bit wider than headquarters at Grimmauld Place, but it had the same odd look as though it had been pushed between the two taller buildings beside it as an afterthought. There was an iron gate with a squeaky hinge and an ornate doorknocker that was used to hold the open/closed sign for Dee's Books, the landlady's eclectic used books store on the first floor of the building.

Dee's Books was small, all things considered, but it was packed with row upon row of shelving filled to burst with all sorts of books imaginable. There was no real order to the books on the shelves, but Dee knew her merchandise as well as Madame Pince had known the collection she watched over. There were comfortable, if antique, armchairs scattered between the stacks for customers to give books a trial-run before purchasing. The bookstore had first attracted Hermione to the building and gotten her talking to Dee—the shop itself wasn't exactly on a main road, but it was close enough to an intersection of corner shops and a gas station that there were people drawn into the bookstore.

The second floor of the building was Dee's living space, very strictly out-of-bounds. Hermione wondered what she did with all the space. The third floor was split into two apartments with the landing from the stairs serving as the foyer between the two. Hermione's rooms were on the left and had the roof access.

Dee was a bibliophile to her core and a cat-lover. The shop was full of cats; they sprawled over every surface, sunning themselves in the front windows among the book display. It gave the place a rather homey feel and made Hermione miss Crookshanks. The other tenant, the right-hand apartment renter, hated cats. He also hated people, animals, nature, books, and sunlight. Mr. Reese looked a bit like a Muggle lawn gnome—round belly, big beard and mustache, large ears, bulbous nose, short legs, would've been cute except he looked like he might like to make life miserable by stealing all the socks while nobody was looking—and was a bona fide misanthrope. He mostly stayed in his room, responded in grunts when he was spoken to, and had cardboard taped to all his windows.

Hermione didn't mind an unsocial neighbor. Less questions coming her way, she figured. Dee would be just about enough to handle, it seemed.

The blank papers Hermione had given the woman—she'd also made her think she'd paid two months of rent in advance, and she _did_ feel a bit guilty about that—said that her name was Helena Cameron, born September 19, 1977. An extra two years because it was easier to explain that she was pushing twenty-two living on her own than nineteen. Not that Dee would question her anyway, with the Confundus doing its job.

_Add guilt to my accumulated emotions_, Hermione sighed to herself, looking at her new flat.

She liked the fact that it was _her_ flat, her own. She didn't like that she'd lied to get it, or that she'd allowed herself to be talked into a part-time job running the till at the bookshop below and would be paying her rent that way. It didn't seem honest.

The rooms came partially furnished. The kitchen was complete with a refrigerator and an oven. There was a bed with a bare mattress in the bedroom. The kitchen-dining area was separated from the sitting room by a half-wall with empty shelves facing the sitting room side. The floors were hardwood and everything was clean. The walls were a nice, neutral beige tone.

The only remarkable thing about the flat was the brilliant red and gold phoenix sitting calmly on the divide between the kitchen and sitting room, watching her stand with her back to the door. Fawkes looked like shite. That was very definitely remarkable. His feathers had taken on a bit of a grayish-peach tinge as they loosened and hung on ruffled-like. She'd even seen a few come loose and promptly curl into ash.

_We cannot live like this_, Fawkes informed her, ruffling his wings a bit and causing several of his feathers to fall loose, nothing but gray ash by the time they hit the floor. _Come here and pluck some of these loose so you can trade them._

"You want me to pluck your feathers?"

_Do you have some other means of income that I was not aware of?_

"I _could_ just go 'round to Grimmauld Place. Or the Burrow."

_And then you would be swamped in a sea of redheads and they'd never let you loose, what with all the questions about the Veil and what's happened. You'd never get anything done._

"I suppose not."

She hadn't remembered how to miss people, yet.

_Let's get this over with._

Fawkes' feathers fought back. It didn't seem to hurt him any; he spent the evening quite amused as Hermione pulled and tugged and worked up quite a sweat. In the end, she had a dozen long, vibrant feathers sitting on the counter next to the bird. His eyes glittered in his version of a smile. She rolled her eyes at him.

_Now you cut them up and sell them._

"Cut them up?"

_So that they don't end up in wands._

She didn't need to ask why he didn't want to donate any more feathers for wand-making.

Hermione didn't own any scissors or knives or anything remotely useful, but she didn't need a wand to do magic anymore. A gesture similar to the proper wand movement had transfigured a hair elastic into a sharp knife and she set to work. The feathers cut easily, but she felt like she was hurting them as she cut; Fawkes ruffled himself and more feathers pooled in a collection of ash beneath him.

Once everything was prepared to Fawkes' specifications, Hermione took out the map of wizarding and Muggle London from Mr. Kobb and had a good look. She'd never considered wizarding London beyond Diagon Alley before. Certainly there were no large gathering places such as that, just little shops spread throughout, hidden…

Or not.

Eleanor Boulevard was an underground wizarding marketplace. The Boulevard was located beneath a run-of-the-mill street with shops, accessed via the alley-side door to a closed-for-demolition-for-the-past-seven-decades shop that none of the Muggles noticed. The Boulevard had the feel of a bazaar—there was much bartering and socializing going on in every colorfully-decorated station. There were no closed shops—there wasn't exactly weather to worry about—but booths and carts and stalls instead. Hermione could easily understand why she'd always been taken to Diagon Alley—not only were the prices fixed, but there were less pickpockets, and a more select variety of wares with quality guaranteed.

The Boulevard was a wealth of everything Hermione needed. Merchant upon merchant with an enormous stock of specialized books. Stall upon stall serving as individual apothecaries and Potions supply shops. Carts of wizarding treats and sweets and joke items. Tailors with their seamstresses that made individually-styled and -fitted robes while you waited. Magical jewelers and metal-smiths who sold everything from charmed talismans for protection to talking mirrors. There was even a lean-to style stall at the very back that had owls and other familiars for sale; Hermione would've sworn she saw a tall wizard leave the back room area of the stall putting a rather suspicious-looking egg into a pocket, memories of secreting a dragon off the Astronomy Tower sent her moving past that shop rather quickly.

There was no cookware, though; no shampoo or toilet paper either, and she would need those just as much as she'd need robes and books and a talking mirror.

The more important thing, though, was finding somebody who would buy portions of phoenix feathers from her without too many questions. The various apothecaries were a good place to start; she couldn't sell more than one or two slices of feather to each stall, such amounts of feather would be suspicious. Luckily, the apothecaries were spread out in the market to avoid too steep a competition. To top it off, Fawkes had given her a strict lecture on the trading value of phoenix feathers, so she would know when one of the owners was trying to trick her out of a few galleons.

Half an hour after she'd arrived on the underground boulevard, Hermione's pockets were heavy with gold. She was quite proud of her pickpocket charms as well, turning any foolish enough to try for her new coins bright blue and sticking the soles of their shoes to the floor where they stood. It was quite entertaining, especially since it took three indigo pickpockets trying to get out of their shoes while they were standing in them for the rest to figure it out.

She bought what she needed and shrunk it down to fit in the bag she'd gotten from Mr. Kobb and brought mostly empty so that she'd have room for her purchases. She took the remaining galleons—and there were more than a few—to the official goblin booth near the entrance to the Boulevard, where she had them exchanged for Muggle money. The goblin was very old and very bored, but he did a thorough check of her money. Simply changing it out, he didn't care who she was or if the money had been acquired legally, just that it was real and he gave her real money in return. She wondered how long she could keep that sort of exchange up—she'd certainly need to put her deposits in a Muggle bank, after all. She couldn't imagine the goblins would be very happy to discover she was the, supposedly dead, witch who had robbed them. Goblins were known to hold grudges for several generations, after all.

Back in Muggle London, she made her way to a bank not extremely far from Dee's bookshop. After a bit of a to-do and the guilt of another Confundus, she managed to get herself a proper bank account and a debit card.

Shopping in Muggle London wasn't nearly so interesting as shopping on Eleanor Boulevard. It was necessary, though. She needed linens for the bed, towels and toiletries for the bath, cookware and utensils, food. While she'd managed to sell all the feathers Fawkes had given her and was therefore at no risk of starving, she still wasn't extremely well off. She would have to budget and stretch the money.

She returned to her new home very late. It was nearly midnight; she'd returned to Eleanor Boulevard when the Muggle shops had closed, glad that the wizarding world tended to keep its own hours. While most of the stalls had been packed away and warded closed for the night, there had been a decent bistro café open to provide her an alternative to cooking her own dinner, and an, admittedly shady, book stall in the far corner of the Boulevard for after.

The books she'd bought went on the shelf separating the kitchen and sitting rooms, though the five of them hardly filled up one tier of the shelving. The food—bare essentials: bread, eggs, milk, butter, meat for sandwiches, cheese, two cans of soup, tea bags, and orange marmalade—went into the fridge and cupboards. Two plates, two cups, a mug, a saucepan, a frying pan, a kettle, three forks, three spoons, a butter knife, a smaller sharp knife, and a bowl all went into the cupboards and drawers as well.

She made the bed, arranged her things in the bathroom as she had a shower, and, to Fawkes' unashamed delight, set the bird's shiny new stand, specially designed for phoenixes with a sort of bowl beneath the perch for catching the ashes, in the corner of the bedroom.

_Very comfortable_, Fawkes commended before tucking his head under a wing and, presumably, drifting off to sleep.

Less relaxed, Hermione spent the next several hours warding her flat. She didn't have the energy to venture up onto her private rooftop—Dee had arthritic knees, so she didn't like to even venture up to the third floor if she didn't have to, and Hermione's was the only one of the apartments with the ladder up. For the moment, she locked and warded the hatch to the roof closed and moved onto the walls of the apartment. She'd learned quite a few strong, thorough, very difficult to break (let alone break without the caster noticing) wards in the past years and she employed all of them before falling into bed, too exhausted to even pull the quilt up over her shoulders.

Fawkes burst into flame three days later. It was rather anticlimactic, even if it was shocking. She'd been eating breakfast one moment, the next her companion was on fire. Then he was just a pile of ash in the basin. For a moment, she'd feared something had gone wrong and he'd actually died. Then a bald head with huge eyes and a glossy beak had poked out and cheeped at her.

She'd never been so relieved in her life, encore or otherwise.

-

The second day she was in her new flat, she went and bought herself a pillow. She'd forgotten to get one in that first shopping excursion, and her back had let her know about it the next morning.

In the next weeks, Hermione came to possess a tall wardrobe and clothes to put in it that hadn't belonged to the late Mrs. Kobb. After receiving her first pay check from Dee, she was able to buy an ornately carved chest to put at the end of her bed, good for hiding her magical things in as it was charmed to keep prying eyes away and only open to the touch of its owner. A two-seater sofa was added to the sitting room for a place to _sit_ in said sitting room, a Victorian thing with dark polished trim and indigo, subtly textured upholstery. By the end of her first month she had a low coffee table that matched the dark polish of the wood in the sofa. A small table and two chairs to match were added to the kitchen.

By the end of the first month the space had been personalized, if a bit Spartanly. There was a large braided rug in the sitting room, browns and blues to match the two-seater. Another rug in the bathroom that doubled as a bath-mat, a third in the bedroom because the floor was always cold in the morning and she couldn't stand it. She didn't go all out and put a few stuffed elf heads on the sitting room wall or anything, but the space developed a bit more character than the neutral beige walls had held at the beginning.

She explored the roof at her leisure and found that she enjoyed the space immensely. The hatch in her sitting room dropped a ladder down that led up to another hatch in the roof situated slightly off-center from the corner. There was a half-height surrounding wall, a great view of the neighboring buildings, and lots of open space. Hermione caught herself planning a roof garden and spells to keep Muggles from noticing the magical plants she wanted to put there even as she took her first tour of the space.


	10. Constans

Unlike so many of his nightmares, Severus was aware that it was nothing but a dream as the night's events unfolded. This nightmare was like so many others, though—Hermione Granger lay on her back at his feet, bleeding out, her breath rattling in her chest, taking on the strange quality of a person's dying breaths.

Disjointedly, Severus rose to his feet despite her too-perfect Immobilizing Jinx, flopping forward awkwardly because of his own recent blood loss, kneeling in a pool of their mingled blood. His robes were saturated with it, hers seeping into the knees of his robes, his still leaking down from his neck across his chest, wicking through the fabric, dripping down into the puddle next to the girl.

"Make it end! Make the pain stop! _Help me_!" Granger's eyes seemed to scream at him, accusing him of sitting idly. He knelt over her, not seeing anything he could do to make things better.

His dream self plunged his hands into her torso, into the gaping holes left behind by Bellatrix's knife. In the dream, he knew that if he could just get something, if he could find it inside the slices and get it out, he would be able to save her. If he could just _find_ it!

Whatever it was.

She was drawing smaller and smaller breaths, her eyes going dim as he kept on digging, shoving his hands deeper, bloody up to the elbows. He couldn't _find it_…

Her eyes were glassy, her body cold and still around his hands, the blood ceased to pump, cooling into pools, globbing on his skin as he withdrew.

Shuddering, he woke, but he could still see the blood, her blood, clinging to his hands and arms except for over the Mark, where her pure, perfect blood had avoided like a Muggle magnet facing the wrong polarity. He threw himself out of bed and stumbled for the bathroom, leaving his lights of, not needing to see the blood, knowing it was there in the shadows.

His soap was of the stinging, scrubbing sort specially ordered for dealing with caustic potions ingredients. He washed until his hands were raw, but still he could see the shadows of the dream. Instead of avoiding the Mark, though, they seemed to cling to it in its darkness, another thing to remind him of his sins.

Desperately, Severus took up his shaving razor, the old, heavy folding blade that murderers seemed to favor. He wasn't going to commit murder, though; he'd done enough of that. Instead, and not for the first time, he took the razor to the inside of his left forearm, the blade not as steady as it would've been in his left, dominant hand, but the Mark was on his left arm. He sliced through the old scars, scraping, ignoring the pain.

A slice across the bottom of the Mark, a scrape of the blade beneath the skin, lifting the flap he'd created away from its natural place. Warm blood seeped out from beneath it, quickly dripping down his wrist into the skin, coating his hand, droplets splashing in the basin. He slashed again, freeing the small-ish flap, and let the skin fall. Then he repeated the motion with another slice of marred skin. The Mark, which had reverted to gray outlined in black after the Dark Lord's death, flared black again, setting his synapses alight with fresh, roaring, searing pain as though he was being Summoned.

After a few moments, the pain helped. He couldn't see the Mark anymore—it was hidden in his blood. The familiar sensation of vertigo from blood loss came over him again, straight out of his most familiar nightmares. Shuddering, Severus threw the blade from him. It clattered noisily against the tile of his shower. He slid down the wall, the rough stones scraping nicely against his bare back, holding his bleeding wrist, hoping that, this time, the Mark wouldn't come back when the potion-saturated bandages Poppy would put over the flesh were in place.

When Minerva arrived a minute later and turned on the lights with a flick of her wand, he was pleased to see that he couldn't see Granger's blood on his hands anymore; his own blood had taken its place.

"Severus," Minerva said sharply, as she always did—the first time, there had been more screaming and fury for what she called his stupidity, but after the shock she always resolved into pitying him. She heaved him up, directing him into the shower and removing the blade, turning the spigot on cold over his head as though it would help.

She left him there with the curtain open as she rinsed the blood from his razor and put it back in its place. She took the scraps of skin he'd torn from his arm, marred black from the Mark though it wasn't a clear shape in so many slices, from the sink and put them in the wastebasket, where Severus could pretend they didn't exist.

His arm stung, but it didn't feel like enough. He knew the Mark would come back again.

Silently, Minerva turned off the shower and helped him to his feet. The cold shower was supposed to help bring him back to his senses, she had told him, but it only ever made him cold and wet.

The first time Minerva had found him like that, he'd overheard Dumbledore explain that he wasn't suicidal, that he just wanted the Mark off and scraping the skin away just happened to involve a lot of blood. Dumbledore had, of course, saved his lecture on needing the Dark Mark in place for later, when the two men were alone.

Those lectures certainly hadn't stopped Severus from taking his razor to the Mark again and again over the years.

Severus woke the next morning in the Hospital Wing with the familiar orange bandage around his left forearm and the fuzzy feeling in his sinuses that came along with Dreamless Sleep potion. Not needing to hear Poppy's disapproval of his actions—again—Severus gathered his dressing gown and left in the dawn before she could stop him.

-

September 1, 1999. The War would be officially two years in the past at the end of the school year. A new wave of first years, fresh from the train, oblivious to the significance of the fact that they were even able to walk through the Entrance Hall, had arrived with all their headache-inducing chatter and laughter. The students were more light and carefree than they'd been in decades—no War, no return of a Dark Lord looming over them. All the students that had been old enough to fight had graduated. Or died.

Severus sighed. It had been a full year and almost another half a year since he'd been saved in the Shrieking Shack and she had been killed. His mind persisted in circling perpetually back to her, though. Hermione Granger, bane of his existence even in her death.

When he brewed—he'd taken it upon himself to restock the infirmary potions, half because he didn't trust Slughorn to give the potions his full attention and half because he needed to keep busy and was avoiding his sketchbook—he thought of her brewing; sometimes just the idea of her brewing, sometimes her brewing in his Potions class. She'd been one of the few students who had a knack for it. Not an intuition, she wasn't cut from the stuff to be the next great Potions Mistress, but she had a steady hand and could follow the directions quite well. Not that he'd ever told her that. And the incessant questions… They rang through his mind when he brewed, what she would be asking him as he moved through the stages of the Wolfsbane he brewed monthly for Remus.

When he taught Defense, he remembered her in his Defense class. She'd been better with the warding and counter-cursing than he'd expected. There was more than book-learning involved in Defense Against the Dark Arts. He'd put her proficiency down to desperation until he'd seen her dueling, actually dueling, after the full-on war had broken out. There was no desperation, determination certainly, but it was calculated, learned. Mastered. She hadn't had the raw power to match Potter, but she'd had the finesse to out-class him in a competitive duel under controlled conditions, probably.

When he graded papers he remembered her lengthy reports, remembered all the scathing remarks he'd written in the margins. Of course, the remarks had only pushed her to write longer, more in-depth essays. That had been the point, though. She learned more that way, he'd told himself. The truth was that he'd found her thoughts on the things he assigned interesting. He'd wanted her opinions—and not just so that he could strike them down. It was the closest he was able to get to her, then.

In his mind, sometimes, a clandestine romance, the participants hardly aware of it, had sprung up between himself and Miss Hermione Granger. Conversations had been twisted with entendres and innuendos that hadn't existed when they'd taken place. Looks exchanged across the Great Hall, the table at Grimmauld Place, in the library that hadn't taken place.

The more he reviewed his memories of her—sometimes with the help of the Pensieve Albus had left him—the more he thought they would've been a good match. She was incredibly intelligent and had had the patience to put up with Potter and the youngest Weasley male, after all. His temper and cutting remarks had never truly fazed her. His ability to assign attention and remove points had held her in check, but those were removed now that she wasn't his student…

And there he always circled back to the fact that she wasn't his student because she was dead. She'd never been able to take her N.E.W.T.s and prove to the world that she was as brilliant as they thought. She'd gotten her Order of Merlin, First Class posthumously.

He forced his thoughts away from Hermione Granger. The first years hadn't yet begun being Sorted, there was nothing of note to keep him occupied… For a split second, he imagined he saw a frizzy haired slip of a girl standing among the first years, but when he blinked the frizzy haired girl turned out to be a boy with a pouf of brown hair on his head. The boy looked like he'd been electrocuted. Idiot.

Lacking anything better to think about, Severus pondered his new owl for a moment. It was a sleek black bird with all the best traits of a fiendish predator. He'd named the thing Chicken, and it was a fitting name. Appearances were misleading, the bloody bird was afraid of _everything_. Doors, windows, movement, dust, the desk, his perch, wind. It was ridiculous. Particularly ridiculous because the one thing Chicken wasn't afraid of was Severus. It was, in an off-kilter sort of way, quite amusing. Annoying as hell, but amusing nonetheless.

Like Hermione.

Severus wrenched his attention back to the Sorting with an inaudible snarl.

He'd missed the Hat's song, which was a pity. They were usually interesting if not entertaining. The A's were done, as were the B's. Carver, Dove was Sorted into Hufflepuff and Severus wondered who in their right mind would name a child Dove.

He clapped lightly when Draper, Stephanie was the first of the first years he'd been paying attention to to be Sorted into Slytherin. The girl was blond, brown-eyed, tan from a childhood summer spent outside. She wasn't the usual monochromatic Pureblood, nor a hulking bulk of a child; she was slight, but there was a bold look in her eyes. She'd do well in Slytherin, Severus smirked.

Granger could've done very well in Slytherin had she not been Muggle-born, Severus thought as the Duley boys and a Miss Edwards were Sorted into Gryffindor, Gryffindor and Ravenclaw. Hermione had turned out to be just as devious bordering on ruthless as any Slytherin, after all. She'd been bright and had certainly had the push to go far. Her cunning had been blunted at first by her Housemates. It had shone through in the end, though. She'd survived… until she hadn't. It had been a Gryffindor trait—that stubborn force of will to _care_ for and about people—that had gotten her killed, after all.

He certainly hadn't asked her to come back for him, hadn't hardly expected her to. Hadn't even expected her to mention to somebody that they might go get his body a few days or a month down the line, when she had time to remember.

The last thing he'd expected when he'd seen her, another uninteresting eleven-year-old among so many others, Sorted was that he'd be the one to watch her die.


	11. Servo Quietis

Dee's Books was a tiny, out of the way shop, but there was always a steady stream, or at least trickle, of people browsing. Not everybody bought something, but, more often than not, the type of person who pursued a book into the type of store that Dee's was was going to come back if they hadn't found something at first look.

Hermione loved it.

For the first three months of her encore—not including the month that she'd spent recovering in Mr. Knobb's hut—Hermione was content to simply live. She woke in the morning, made herself breakfast, showered and dressed, then left the apartment to shop. She had a book collection to rebuild and build upon, a wardrobe to fill, hobbies to acquire. She frequented Eleanor Boulevard, exchanging Muggle and wizarding money and feathers, spending hours wandering the bazaar and browsing. She became very good at bartering, much to the chagrin of the merchants. Sometimes she ate lunch out, other times she returned to her apartment and made something. After lunch, she ran the register 'til Dee closed the shop, then joined her landlady for a late dinner before retiring to bed with whatever book she'd brought up from downstairs or bought at the Boulevard.

She acquired the trinkets the apartment had lacked initially: a wizarding wireless for her bedroom, curtains. A desk to put beneath the window in her bedroom, the book shelves to cover all the other walls in that room. Book shelves in the living room were implemented a little more creatively, becoming end-tables for the sofa and to store things on—or rather, strew things out upon in a messily ordered fashion that her parents had always insisted meant true genius.

On the weekends, when Dee's shop was closed, she began to assemble the garden on the roof. It was a slow process. It had to be mostly secret from the landlady, and smuggling anything remotely interesting into the building in the first place was a challenge. Hermione had never backed down from a challenge, though—she'd needed one after so long being the positively _ordinary_ Helena. Seeds weren't so difficult to smuggle, and therefore not only much more readily available at Eleanor Boulevard, but more worthwhile for her to buy for the roof.

She had a good start on things by the time autumn rolled around and things needed to be pruned for the season. It took a week to work out the proper way to go about it, but she eventually erected a small greenhouse in the center of the roof, where even passing wizards not affected by her anti-Muggle wards couldn't see it from the street, and moved the beginnings of her garden there. There were sturdy, dirt-smudged tables with seedlings at the center, the piping of the watering apparatus hung from the ceiling, stacks of empty pots and boxes, pots full of plants. The hatch was in the far corner of the greenhouse with the door to the rest of the roof directly behind it, both well away from the more dangerous plants and any that might try to grab her.

She'd charmed the entire roof to, first, repel Muggle eyes; second, it would appear to any who managed to see it—be they the wizarding passers-by or Muggle-borns not yet attending school or Squibs—as though she had a rather mediocre collection of dying potted plants and a grimy, cracked greenhouse.

Meanwhile, her apartment acquired personality and became home. She took out a subscription to the _Daily Prophet_ and began to catch up.

Then things caught up with her.


	12. Velieris

Severus held in a sigh. The Ministry was truly ridiculous sometimes. And Minerva was allowing them to be, right in the school! As if they were hiding away Harry Savior-of-the-Wizarding-World Potter.

"Where could he have gone?" Minerva asked, shifting her stance beside him so that they could have their soft conversation without the Ministry officials overhearing them, no matter that Kingsley Shacklebolt was a friend as well as the Minister of Magic.

"No idea," he returned, continuing to watch the Aurros as they made their way through the Entrance Hall, beginning their in-depth search of the castle since they'd finished with the grounds. He'd been quite pleased when he'd been able to make all three of the Magical Law Enforcement employees fidget under his gaze, no matter that he was no longer their professor, that they were actually the ones with the authority at the moment.

He would not have kept tabs on Harry Potter after he'd finished off the Dark Lord and left Hogwarts and was no longer Severus' responsibility. Unfortunately, the rest of the staff was not so ready to wash their hands of him.

Potter was, in short, having _issues _since the end of the War.

After Granger's funeral, Potter had pushed away his friends. He'd shut himself up in Grimmauld Place and not spoken to anybody but his barmy house elf for months until Ron Weasley had confronted him, his eldest brother accompanying him. It had not gone well. Potter hadn't been taking care of himself. The ensuing argument had revealed a good deal about Weasley's wartime activities—just why he hadn't been with Potter and Granger when they'd arrived at Hogwarts to lead the battle. With that bit of public knowledge, the Auror-in-training had fallen out of favor with the wizarding world and had kept his head down ever since, not that Severus minded.

Ginny Weasley had tried as well, after the newsstand chatter about her brother had died down a bit, but Potter had ended up in St. Mungo's for psychological treatment despite those efforts. The mediwizards hadn't had much luck, according to the _Prophet_. Minerva, as the teacher on staff who'd been closest to him, had visited the hospital to check on him and come back to share a bottle of firewhiskey and cry a bit in Severus' chambers, as had become her habit when it came to wartime reminiscing and problems that had extended past their due.

Nobody could figure out what was wrong with him. There was much speculation—backlash from his scar, a curse nobody had noticed before, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression—but none of the healers assigned to him could make him talk, let alone come up with a way to help him.

The wizarding world had been very depressed.

But that was old news. The new news was that Harry Potter had disappeared from his secure ward at St. Mungo's without a trace. After two days without a sign of him, the Ministry had gone into action. Every place that he might've run to was being searched very thoroughly.

Severus declined to point out that Potter had managed to hide from the Dark Lord and his Death Eaters, admittedly with help, for ten months without even taking his N.E.W.T.s. If he didn't want to be found, he knew how to disappear.

Again, the Hogwarts staff was atwitter. Owls were constantly coming and going from Minerva's office and she checked with members of the Order, but nobody had seen the Boy Who Lived Twice.

As he watched the Aurors finish in the Entrance Hall and move on to the Great Hall, Severus wondered what sort of search would be put out for him if he were to up and disappear.

-

When even Kreacher, Potter's elf, hadn't been able to Apparate to Potter's hiding spot, Minerva truly began to fret. Severus was, as usual, her shoulder to cry on and the ears she poured out all her worries to. Apparently the rest of the staff would think less of her if she were to show anything apart from confidence in the Ministry's ability to find the wayward hero.

Refilling his own tumbler, he settled in for another few hours of listening to the woes of the headmistress, bemoaning his acceptance of the deputy position, his acceptance of a return to Hogwarts at all.


	13. Adservio

Hermione crossed her arms across her chest and stared down at her best friend, the hero of the wizarding world. He was currently sitting on her Victorian two-seater in hospital-issue pajamas, his glasses crooked, looking as though he hadn't slept in months. It was all she could do not to scowl at him.

"Harry Potter, you are being ridiculous," she informed him. His eyes snapped up to hers, going wide behind his round glasses. It was the first time he'd looked at her since she'd led him, both of them Disillusioned, out of St. Mungo's. He hadn't even put up a fight not knowing who she was or where she was taking him.

"Hermione," he gasped, a hand flashing up to adjust his glasses. He blinked.

"Yes, it's me."

"You're alive."

"Yes. And _you're _an idiot."

He grinned at her.

-

A week later, completely unaware of the turmoil in the wizarding world as she'd been ignoring the newspaper that arrived every morning, Hermione was relieved to have her friend back. Her brother, really, after so long in the tent together after Ron had left them, so many trials. They'd robbed Gringott's together, destroyed the last Horcruxes, seen to it that Hogwarts was warned and defended in time to go into battle. Now that she had him back, she couldn't imagine her life, her encore, without him. Following that line, she understood why he'd been in St. Mungo's unable to snap out of his funk. They'd been each other's psychological supports through it all, to lose it all at the end… She blamed Fawkes' company and the lingering serenity of her time spent beyond the Veil for her own stability without him.

"What was it like being dead?" Harry asked one morning over breakfast. She looked up at him, considering.

"You tell me. You died, too."

"That doesn't count. It was only temporary," he said, setting down his fork to give her an earnest look. She raised an eyebrow at him and he rolled his eyes. "Okay—more temporary than yours, then. It was only a few minutes and yours was… longer."

"Hm," she agreed, looking down and realizing that she was picking at the eggs on her plate. From the bookcase-divide between the kitchen and sitting room, Fawkes was watching her with his head cocked in silence, waiting for her answer.

"It was cloudy and peaceful; I was at King's Cross. Dumbledore was there, and that fragment of Riddle's soul…"

"It was _light_ and peaceful for me," Hermione said softly, chewing on her lip unconsciously, thinking as she spoke, comparing what Harry had told her—before she'd died and just recently—to what she'd experienced. "I was alone for awhile, then I was with friends. There were books… It was incredibly peaceful. There was nothing wrong, nothing to worry about…"

It struck Hermione that she wouldn't be comfortable telling somebody who _hadn't_ died about her experience beyond the Veil. Even telling Harry about what true death was like—as compared to the shadow of it, the comatose sort of near-dead limbo he'd experienced that hadn't been life _or_ death so far as she was aware—seemed taboo, but she figured Fawkes would stop her if she were to breech something truly secret.

He smiled a small smile that wasn't as tense as it had been in the past. "I'm glad you had that peace, after everything."

She reached out and took his hand, giving it a squeeze across the table. While she'd had her peace, he'd been grieving; she'd probably never forgive herself.

-

In that first week with Harry, she'd remembered compassion, happiness, regret, love, remorse, and shame. The grief was fresh and the guilt was real; it weighed on her, but it was good to _feel _again.

-

Living in an apartment with Harry wasn't much different from living in the tent with Harry. He let her do her thing and she let him do his. They didn't have Horcruxes to worry about, her wards met his—even more paranoid than her—standards, and he enjoyed being out of the fishbowl that was the life of Harry Potter in the post-war wizarding world.

They shared the bed at night. It was queen size, so there was plenty of room. It was nice to hold and be held and feel safe at night. They spent the mornings catching up, reading the _Prophet_ and laughing at the panic his disappearance had produced. Hermione would go down and work at the book shop in the afternoons and Harry would nap, finally allowing himself to recover from the war a year past. They listened to the wireless in the evenings, danced sometimes; Lee had continued with the Potterwatch, beginning by mocking the rabid fans that followed his life like none other, but the latest episodes were more concerned with the ongoing search for him and the guests debated the probability of his death.

"D'you think we should let them know I'm okay?" Harry asked one morning, turning the _Prophet_ around so that she could read the headline—the wizarding world had been scoured over and Harry Potter had not been found. He was presumed dead.

"You should write Ginny," Hermione nodded.

_I suppose you'll allow me to deliver it_, Fawkes half-sighed, half-suggested. _Their faces are sure to be entertaining, seeing me._

"She must _hate_ me," Harry put his head to the table with a loud thunk.

"According to how you tell it, she's probably just worried. Ron, though, probably hates you."

"Yeah, well," Harry sighed, lifting his head up again and rubbing his forehead, which was a bit red. "I don't mind having what I said out between us. It was no good leaving it unsaid."

"Jeez, Harry, when did you go and grow up?"

"Probably about when my favorite grown-up went and died," he mock-glared at her. She wasn't sure when it had happened, but sometime along the line he'd put her death behind him. She was glad for it, because she'd fallen into the habit of joking about it a bit, unable to keep herself from making certain observations.

As winter rolled in, Harry helped with the last of her seasonal preparations on the roof. Herbology had never been his, or her for that matter, favorite subject at Hogwarts, but they both found it calming in its own way. The plants were very much alive and thrummed with magic, seeping in and relaxing them as they worked with the soil. They were quiet when they worked, thinking their own thoughts. Hermione remembered Neville and his penchant for Herbology, but didn't allow herself to drift further down those thoughts, as they potentially led to Hogwarts and other connected memories she certainly didn't want to fall into if she could help it, though she sometimes forgot why.

-

After a month, Hermione knit Harry a hat that pulled down over his forehead and hid his scar. He had been going a bit stir-crazy cooped up in the flat, only ever speaking to her and sometimes Dee, who they'd told Harry was her brother, Marvin. With the hat and his glasses transfigured to a different shape, they began to make frequent trips to Eleanor Boulevard, which Harry found just as enticing as she had.


	14. Samhain

Halloween arrived at Hogwarts with its usual back-stabbing abruptness. Oblivious children swarmed the halls, smiling at the hovering jack-o-lanterns, comparing him to the bats that occupied the Great Hall during mealtimes, and being altogether naively enchanted with the holiday. Severus' fellow professors remembered the day as one to celebrate, the day the Dark Lord had fallen the first time.

Didn't they remember the cost of that fall?

In recent years, that price had been outweighed by the price of the final fall, that being Hermione Granger. But the first fall… the first fall had set the second in motion. If the Potters, if Lily, had never been killed, Harry Potter would never have been in Gryffindor. Any son of James Potter, _raised_ by James Potter, would have, undoubtedly, been in Slytherin. Harry Potter would not have been friends with Hermione Granger if he'd been in Slytherin, as there was no way she would've been in his House. Chances are, she would've been Sorted into Ravenclaw if the Hat hadn't known she'd be needed in Gryffindor.

Things would've been different.

Halloween always reminded him that it was his fault. _He_ had been the one to overhear and deliver the prophecy that had set it all in motion. _He_ had been the one who had attracted attention to Lily, who had given her the chance to give her life in the place of her son's, though that had certainly not been his intent. _He_ had been the one who had watched Harry Potter and Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger become friends, allowed their delinquent interference in the adult world. _He_ had been the one who had pushed them when the time came, prodded Potter in the right direction, fed Granger the right reading material. _He_ had been the one to deliver the sword. _He_ had been the one to watch her die.

He had been a driving force, _the_ driving force, in the Voldemort Wars. Hell, he'd gotten an Order of Merlin for it, a decorated war hero status and a delusional fan club to boot. If anybody were to ever really look at it, to examine his life… It had been as much his war as it had been Voldemort's or Dumbledore's. His masters.

Halloween wasn't a time for carved pumpkins and sweets; Halloween was a time for bitterness and firewhiskey.

"I had no right to survive those bloody wars, Minerva," he informed the headmistress when she Flooed to his rooms that evening. He'd sequestered himself after the required appearance at dinner and wasn't nearly pissed enough to be feeling any better about his life and survival yet.

"That's not the way it works, Severus," Minerva responded, her voice much too cheerful in its neutrality for him not to scowl at her, even though she was hard to look at when she was swimming around in his vision like that.

He merely grunted in response and filled up his tumbler with more whiskey, pouring her a few fingers in the tumbler he'd set out for her when he'd begun drinking and using his knuckle to move it towards her. With a bleary sort of nod she accepted the liquor and joined him in front of the fire. There wasn't very much to say anymore.


	15. Denuo Samhain

Hermione didn't know what to say to Harry on the night that his parents had died. He had been quiet all day, sitting up in the greenhouse and pruning things. He'd even sealed things up and repotted her mandrakes.

"They were playing cards," she said that night when she set his dinner in front of him. Once, she'd provided diced mushrooms she had only been partially certain wouldn't give him hallucinations let alone nutrients—now she'd made completely mushroom-free stir fry, his favorite. The vegetables were bright and in a variety of colors, and she'd tenderized and marinated the hell out of the steak before setting the whole thing in the pan full of oil and spices she couldn't pronounce. It was a bit of a specialty.

"What?"

"Your parents. On the other side of the Veil."

"Cards?"

"Yes. Your dad kept pulling cards out of nothing and dealing in whoever was nearest, didn't take any excuses. Your mom always won."

Harry smiled, tucking heartily into his meal. She was fairly certain it was the first thing he'd eaten all day.

"I wish I'd known them."

"Things would certainly be different."

He smiled at her. "We could be playing cards with them right now."

"That would certainly be a change," Hermione couldn't help but smirk. She didn't want to mention that, had things been different, they both could've been beyond the Veil, playing cards with the Potters, Tonks, Sirius, and Dumbledore. She didn't want to mention that she _had_ spent awhile playing cards with them, even though the subject brought it to mind in the first place. Harry seemed oblivious to it, though, merely content to have something to think about other than death, even if it was just cards.

"D'you think we should go visit them?" he asked, setting the dishes to cleaning themselves in the sink and supervising while she selected a good book for her evening reading. She'd been favoring Arithmancy lately; it had always been her favorite.

"I don't much fancy another trip through the Veil at this juncture, Harry."

"No, I mean their graves."

"There's a vigil at Godric's Hollow tonight," Hermione said, nodding at the paper sitting on top of the coffee table, folded open so that the ad on the third page was on display.

Harry contemplated. Hermione wasn't sure what she wanted him to say. She understood, sort of, his want to feel closer to his parents, and that the best way for him to do that was to visit their graves. But she couldn't help remembering the events that had taken place the last time they had visited Godric's Hollow together, the terror, the snake, the broken wand, barely escaping. A shiver shook its way through Harry and she had the feeling he'd been remembering the same thing she had.

"Maybe we could just go to the movies?"

"Good idea."


End file.
